The state of Michigan is determined to put mother Jennifer Crumbley behind bars for manslaughter in the shooting deaths of four Oxford High School students. Fifteen-year-old Ethan Crumbley, Jennifer’s son, carried out the shooting. The state says that the mom should have seen red flags and somehow stopped the tragedy.
James Crumbley, Jennifer’s husband will be tried later for the same thing. Both have been sitting in prison awaiting trial for almost three years. It is the first time any parents have been charged criminally for a school shooter’s actions. Their disturbed son pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
But the state and the community want more vengeance, which is understandable since these terrible killings keep happening and no one seems to know how to stop them. Perhaps upping the ante and putting parents in prison will do it, they think.
But there are problems with this case. As the jury goes into deliberations on Monday, there are many questions left unanswered. The jury is being asked to find Crumbley guilty of the deaths of children she didn’t harm. But there is a child she arguably did harm whom the state would rather not notice. All the evidence points to the Crumbleys being absent and oblivious parents at best and abusive and neglectful parents at worst. Why didn’t the state charge them with child abuse of Ethan? If they had, it would probably be a slam dunk.
Ethan lived in a filthy bedroom that was so messy that his mother let him move to another room rather than clean it. The Crumbleys left him alone so often that his defense attorney’s expert witness called him a “feral” child who had been abandoned by his parents. Neighbors reported that the couple fought loudly and often in front of their son. Jennifer was carrying on an affair, not just with another man but with several people she and her boyfriend found on an adult swinger’s app. Ethan developed 13 cavities at the same time. There were reports that food was often in short supply in the Crumbley home.
Jennifer, however, continued to lavish time and money on her horse hobby instead of stocking the cabinets and making sure her son was okay even after he lost his best friend, his grandmother, and his dog in a short period of time.
But instead of charging the parents with child abuse, which would seem like a slam dunk, the state has overreached and charged them with unintentional manslaughter. Even the New York Times opinion page can’t figure it out.
There is a logical contradiction in the state declaring Ethan Crumbley an adult — with full responsibility for his crime — while prosecuting his parents for gross negligence in child care. Ethan Crumbley was a child, or he wasn’t. He was responsible for his actions, or his parents were. Can the state argue both positions at once? Prosecutors insist they can.
While the parents have been excoriated for giving him access to the gun, this is something of a legal dead end. Michigan, at the time of the shooting, did not have a safe-storage gun law on the books. (It does now.) The Crumbleys were not legally obliged to keep the weapon locked away from their son.
Prosecutors, then, have tried to build a case from the vagaries of the family’s interactions as reconstituted from text messages, Facebook exchanges, and the testimony of acquaintances, who, didn’t seem to have known the Crumbleys very well, or have liked them very much.
The Crumbleys had their share of problems. We can puzzle over the true meaning of the fragments of family life in the evidence, but all we really know is this: Ethan Crumbley was depressed and struggling. Everything else, in the end, is open to interpretation.
Jennifer Crumbley’s attorney pointed out the state’s mistake in her closing arguments, which should make all of us worried about how far politically motivated prosecutors can go in their never-ending quest for convictions.
"Can every parent really be responsible for everything their children do, especially when it's not foreseeable?" asked defense attorney Shannon Smith. “If [my son] starts looking at nude pictures on his cellphone that I got him on his birthday, should I be held accountable? … Am I responsible if he sends a picture of his penis to a girl?"
Everyone knows that if you give the state an inch, it's going to take an entire continent. What more atrocities will they inflict on parents if a new precedent is set and Jennifer Crumbley is convicted of involuntary manslaughter? I shudder to think of it. One need only look at my regular reporting on juvenile court to see the kind of injustice parents are already facing. The state would love nothing more than to add more jailable offenses to their already too-long list.
Jennifer Crumbley isn’t likable, and her parenting was pretty terrible. I don’t like to judge others’ parenting because the evidence in a courtroom is only a small snapshot of what probably went on behind closed doors. Jennifer is most likely not the monster the state described but is also not the innocent, loving mother the defense tried to construct.
There seems to be more than enough evidence to find both parents guilty of neglect and abuse of their child, who killed other people’s children. But the state did not meet its burden to show that the Crumbleys knew that their son would or could do what he did. The evidence suggests that Ethan hid his activities from his parents, and they were so absent and consumed with themselves that they never saw any of the problems he was having.
Why didn’t the state charge the Crumbleys with neglect and abuse of the child they were responsible for instead of manslaughter for the children their son killed? We should all be asking why prosecutors for the state chose to break new ground in the war against parents instead of using easier laws on the books to punish these two. Who is your government planning to use this new weapon against after they jail the Crumbleys?
If the jury finds Jennifer Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter, you might not feel sorry for her, but consider what the consequences and implications could be for the rest of us. I hope the jury doesn’t hand more power to an already out-of-control judicial system that is careening over a cliff with unfair political witch hunts everywhere you look.
It also shouldn't surprise you that the school officials who failed to check Ethan's bag on the day of the shooting where the gun would have been discovered and didn't send him home after finding a violent drawing and clear warning of danger got immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. Conveniently, the state can't prosecute their own who were involved in this failure to protect children while hoping we'll all be too busy hating the Crumbleys to notice.
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